Exposing the underbelly of Armstrongism in all of its wacky glory! Nothing you read here is made up. Every crazy, weird and wacky quote is straight from the pens of Armstrongite leaders or members who think they possess some insight into God and the Bible. What you read here is the up to date face of Herbert W Armstrong's legacy. It's the gritty and dirty behind the scenes look at Armstrongism as you have never seen it before!

Friday, September 11, 2015

New Bobby Fischer Movie Includes His Involvement With The Worldwide Church of God

A new movie about a moment in the life of Bobby Fischer is set to release around the country next Wednesday. The producers of the film were in contact with The Painful Truth for information about Fischer's time spent being wrapped in Armstrongism.

The WCG/Ambassador Foundation used Fischer as a publicity tool and took hundreds of thousands of dollars of his money over a ten year time period. Many attribute his decline into madness to have been initiated by the church and is aberrant teachings.

The movie, which opens Wednesday in Los Angeles in limited release,
works as a psychological thriller that begins in Fischer's troubled
childhood, then shifts to a sports drama with all the tension building
toward Fischer's match with Spassky. Schreiber, speaking beautiful
Russian, plays against Maguire's wild-eyed intensity with elegance and
humanity.
Together, they illustrate how both men were imprisoned by chess; Fischer by his own mind and Spassky by the Soviet regime.

Documentary
footage is interspersed with the chess-playing dialogue-free scenes as
Zwick aimed to shift between Fischer's private hell and the media circus
he lived. The effect is "a fragmented portrait that wasn't dissimilar
to what his life might have been," said Zwick.

Fischer
joined the apocalyptic cult Worldwide Church of God for a time, then
ended up in Pasadena, consumed by paranoia and living under a pseudonym.
In 1992, he replayed Spassky in war-torn Yugoslavia. But the match
violated U.N. sanctions and the U.S. issued an arrest warrant for
Fischer. The chess champ lived the rest of his life in exile,
occasionally coming out of seclusion to issue venomous attacks,
particularly aimed at Jews.

Was Fischer really mad? Fischer had serious disagreements with how the USA was being run. Ezra Pound, the greatest American poet of the last century, was also a fierce critic and he was also declared mad and put in an asylum. He was not mad at all, just a famous America that they had to discredit and silence.

7:48, The Painful Truth website includes the full archive of the Ambassador Report issues. For almost 25 years, the Ambassador Report provide an alternative perspective about Armstrongism and its offshoots, and an outlet for those whose experiences in the movement stood in stark contrast to the official COG narrative.

In 1977, Len Zola, one of the AR's founders, interviewed Bobby Fischer, and Fischer exposed HWA and GTA for their fraudulent practices and behaviors.

By the next year, Fischer seemed to have done an about-face and was suing the AR, with the lawsuit filed on his behalf by none other than WCG lawyer Ralph Helge, in cahoots with longtime HWA henchman Stan Rader. (Helge would later staunchly defend the Tkaches during lawsuits by former members in the '90s, then cross over to UCG after he retired. He now preaches for them regularly. Hey, whatever pays the bills.)

Within months of Helge's filing of the lawsuit, Fischer was accusing Helge and Rader of lying and conspiring against "his best legal interests." The lawsuit against AR died, and, of course, Helge began barking that the church might sue Fischer.

It was a hilarious circus, and highly entertaining.

But AR was smack-dab in the middle of it, when nobody else was. No wonder the producers of the Fischer movie reached out to The Painful Truth. Their AR archive has all of this info and more.

So, ironically, you were quite correct when you called them "a quality source."

Anonymous 7:48, first person testimony of people who interacted with Bobby Fischer, or had any other Armstrong or WCG related experiences is not invalidated simply because they "left the church". The Painful Truth serves many useful purposes, one of which involves the compilation of the "exit interviews" of the people whose consciences dictated that they needed to leave. It is brutally honest, warts and all.